In "Those Bastards" Simon Armitage writes about the fear that upper classes have upon working class revolt. Ccompare this theme with one of Duffy's poems.

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In "Those Bastards" Simon Armitage writes about the fear that upper classes have upon working class revolt. Ccompare this theme with one of Duffy's poems.

Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage are both modern poets with liberal visions of the world. This is indicated in such poems as "Education for Leisure" and "Those bastards". Although the key theme of those both poems are social divisions, the lower class personas have different attitude to elites, take different actions and have slightly different emotions. Overall, Duffy and Armitage presented two types of socially excluded people and indicated why upper classes are scared of their behaviour.

First of all, the idea of working-class revolt is linked in both poems with the image of killing. In "Education for Leisure" the voice states at the end: "I get our bread-knife and go out./The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm". This means that the persona touches you with a knife in order to kill you. Duffy faces in this passage reader directly by using the pronoun "you" in order to show that everybody can be harmed by the working-class. Duffy also indicates that when working-class rebel they get easily excited -